unreasonable.

Substance dualism

from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Making meaning

Soraj Hongladarom on finding meaning in a bewildering world.

Dogmatism and skepticism are but two sides of the same coin. Either one holds on to something very passionately, or one, equally passionately, holds on to the fact that one does not hold on to anything. Neither are healthy for any society.

The return of the dire wolf

Several philosophers on Daily Nous respond to the recent announcement that Colossal Biosciences has bred three dire wolves named Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi.

According to Colossal, the dire wolf is now a de-extinct species. This raises lots of scientific and ethical questions. Where to begin?

We are animals

Gregory McElwain for the Blog of the APA on Mary Midgley.

She argued that philosophy is, among other things, like plumbing. Both practices deal with complex, underlying systems that support our lives. These parallel systems of thought and pipework go largely unnoticed until something goes wrong. Conceptual faults and tangles—like their counterparts in the pipework—can cause real difficulties for life above the surface. Philosophy is valuable because it provides the tools required to diagnose the problems that ail us and can offer repairs to restore or improve things.

Almost everyone’s wrong

In the second part of his interview, J P Andrew asks Galen Strawson about free will, past and future selves, and the good life.

If you were to ask me what I think is the best account of the self — if we have to use that word to name something, what should we use it to name? — then I would be inclined to say that, as it were, there’s a new self with every experience.

After MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre has died aged 96. Jane O’Grady summarises his work in an obituary for The Guardian.

By reviving the sort of ethics that identifies “the good” with human flourishing, MacIntyre aimed to lead us out of “the new dark ages”, presumably into a better future. He influenced the resurgence of virtue ethics and communitarianism (he denied espousing either), and the now fashionable distrust of liberalism, individualism and the Enlightenment.

Eureka!

Steven Gimbel for 3 Quarks Daily on the value of thinking without AI.

By seeing knowledge as mere facts to be distilled without the struggle that leads to the ecstasy of enlightenment, my students are depriving themselves of one of the most profound delights of humanity and the humanities.

A radical act

Massimo Pigliucci for Psyche on the lessons to be learned from four ancient Sceptics.

Socrates emphasises the benefits of understanding how little you know; Protagoras reminds us that different perspectives have different uses and that there’s no ‘view from nowhere’; Cicero encourages us to put more effort into knowing the important things and being comfortable with doubt for less important ones; and Pyrrho argues that suspending judgment actually brings peace of mind.

Real wind and real rain

Anil Seth for Big Think on the chances of creating sentient AI.

The closer you look at the brain, the less like a computer it seems. There is no clean division between “mindware” and “wetware” as there is between hardware and software in our silicon devices, and even a single neuron is a vastly complex biological factory. The brain-as-computer metaphor was only ever a metaphor, and we always get into trouble when we confuse a metaphor with the thing itself.

Freedom of discussion

Mark Satta for the Blog of the APA on academic freedom for students.

I think it is worth trying to cultivate spaces where students feel free to voice and work through even their bad ideas. But I think it’s valuable to try to do this in a way that minimizes the potential negative impact on other students and that does not turn the university into an unrestricted free speech zone akin to a public park or sidewalk.

If you gotta ask

J P Andrew asks Galen Strawson about materialism, consciousness and panpsychism.

The physical is not what we thought it was when we naturally thought that consciousness couldn’t be physical. We’ve got to completely rethink what the physical is.

A flick of the fingers

Costica Bradatan for Literary Review on three early modern thinkers: Montaigne, Descartes and Pascal.

In 1647, Pascal and Descartes, the young scientific prodigy and the celebrated founder of modern rationalism, would meet in person, but the encounter didn’t go very well. Descartes didn’t seem particularly impressed by Pascal, while Pascal must have found Descartes a touch too patronising. To ensure the survival of their mutual admiration, certain people should perhaps steer clear of each other.

Non-judgmentalism

Martin Butler for 3 Quarks Daily on the case for withholding moral judgement.

Non-judgmentalism is about developing the virtue of humility which means recognising that ambiguity, nuance and uncertainty are all too real, and so holding back on judgment can often be the more truthful response. At the very least it means recognising that there are many cases — more than we might think — where easy moral verdicts need to be complex, conditional and nuanced, and should not be immediately pronounced.

Stale cabbage

Peter Adamson for his History of Philosophy podcast series on Descartes’ sceptical method.

Scholastics and common-sense civilians alike are not just suffering from the occasional false belief: their whole understanding of the world is riddled with falsehood. They believe in the reality of things like colours and sounds, cold and heat, little souls in rocks, a sun that goes around the earth. Somehow, Descartes needs to get his reader to give all this up.

Audio, 30 mins.

Saving appearances

Kit Wilson for The Hedgehog Review on the problem with reductive materialism.

The manifest image describes the full-blown, rich world as we actually experience it: bursting with values, colors, morals, ordinary objects such tables and trees and coffee mugs, as well as hope, suffering, and joy. The scientific image describes the minimalist, Galilean world of quantities that we imagine supplies the underlying scaffold: microphysical particles, forces, mathematical laws, and not much else. Sellars thought our inability to reconcile the two was one of the defining predicaments — if not the defining predicament — of our age.

Fish sauce

Steven Hales on acquired taste and the importance of subtlety in aesthetics.

Once you figure out what Faulkner is trying to do, and get a feel for his use of language, then you can see what makes him good. Einstein on the Beach sounds repetitious and dull until the surprise shock of a real change, and then you understand how you were intentionally lulled into complacency. Acquired taste is largely epistemic: you have to discover, grasp and understand the hidden virtues and not just the obvious ones.

False dilemma

Kyle Munkittrick for 3 Quarks Daily on moral abundance (and the trolley problem).

Moral Abundance shifts our attention from the moral question in front of us to the opportunity to eliminate it all together. The solution to the trolley problem is not one track or the other, but to invent, build, and deploy safer trolleys.

Peterbot

Stephanie Convery for The Guardian has a conversation with Peter Singer AI.

My most memorable and exciting philosophy lessons were the ones in which, as a class, we hotly debated ideas in which we were all materially and emotionally invested. The AI floats loftily above the emotional fray, coolly dispensing pre-programmed wisdom from the cloud, while we grapple with the contradictions and complications of actually living.

Virtue

from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Tied to a lamppost

Richard Healey for the LSE Philosophy Blog on why it is wrong to keep pets.

Our desire for companionship or our aim of using a relationship with a pet to educate our children about love and death cannot contribute to a satisfactory justification, because these reasons appeal to our interests rather than the interests of the animals themselves.

Update: article no longer available.

What would Aristotle think?

Angela Chen for Vox on being friends with a chatbot.

The chatbot, at least until it becomes sapient, can only simulate caring, and so true friendship isn’t possible. (For what it’s worth, my editor queried ChatGPT on this and it agrees that humans cannot be friends with it.)

A cure for nihilism

Sasha Mudd for Prospect gives a Nietzschean account of Donald Trump and the New Right.

It is liberal ideology that, on their telling, has dismantled national identity, faith and traditional social structures, leaving behind nothing but moral confusion and an unhealthy obsession with pronouns, past injustices and marginalised groups.

Predictive processing

Julian Baggini for The Francis Crick Institute on the neuroscientific account of human perception.

Science starts by studying the world as it appears to us, on the assumption that it is real. Yet what science then discovers is that reality is not as it seems at all. Solid objects under an electron microscope are revealed to be filled with empty space; time is relative; you can measure the speed or position of a particle but not both. Science seems to pull the rug of reality from under its own feet.

More human than ever

According to a paper by Cameron R Jones and Benjamin K Bergen, two Large Language models have passed the Turing test.

When prompted to adopt a humanlike persona, GPT-4.5 was judged to be the human 73% of the time: significantly more often than interrogators selected the real human participant.

Clear and distinct

Peter Adamson for his History of Philosophy podcast series on the life and works of René Descartes.

That sound you hear is the starting-gun for Early Modern Philosophy being fired. The sparks would ignite a flame of enlightenment that would spread across Europe.

Audio, 20 mins.

A modest proposal

Stephen Fry for New Humanist on intellectual uncertainty and liberal values.

Maybe I should be really fighting for the prohibition of testosterone, and walking up and down Oxford Street with a big sign.

Nodding along

Jonny Thomson for Big Think on why we don’t really care about the truth.

We accept or reject statements based on utilitarian goals, not on their truthfulness. In Nietzsche’s words, we will accept and look for truth only when it has “pleasant, life-preserving consequences.” Conversely, we are hostile “to potentially harmful and destructive truths.” We do not have epistemic vigilance, but a Machiavellian one.

Causal closure

Katalin Balog for 3 Quarks Daily on causal closure and the mind-body problem.

It is even possible that there is no real disagreement between the dualist and the materialist. They might be simply two different descriptions of the same reality in terms of different conceptual schemes, each involving a different basic metaphysical concept of property.

The humanity of humanities

Vernon W Cisney for Feed Your Head on the value — and the dangers — of studying Philosophy.

Our communities can become suspicious of us when we start questioning our shared values. And when our communities become suspicious of us, it’s very possible that we may soon find ourselves on the outside of those communities.

Time and memory

Emily Herring for Philosophy Bites on Henri Bergson.

Audio, 18 mins.

What are thoughts?

Sam Baron for The Conversation on minds and brains.

The thing we are most certain about — that we have thoughts — is still completely unexplained in physical terms. That’s not for a lack of effort.

Wilful ignorance

Rachel Robison-Greene for 3 Quarks Daily on why some people will never change their minds.

At a certain point, for better or for worse, we’ve invested so much time and effort into our identities, we feel that there’s too much at stake to change them. We don’t want our social lives to change. We don’t want to feel differently about who we are and what we’ve done. We don’t want different kind of reasons to motivate our actions. We’d rather have stability than truth.

Endowed with thought

Mark Rowlands for Nautilus on the rationality of animals.

The ancient Stoic philosopher, Chrysippus, once told a story, an early thought experiment, of a dog tracking a rabbit. Running, nose to the ground, the dog arrives at a three-way fork in the path. He quickly sniffs the first two paths, and not finding the scent in either of the first two, immediately runs down the third path, without bothering to sniff first. If the dog can do this, he would have executed a logical inference of the form: Either A or B or C; Not A; Not B; Therefore, C.

Get her a bracelet

Jane Wickline on Saturday Night Live gives dating advice via the trolley problem.

Video, 4 mins.

Science is best

Jonny Thomson for Big Think on science and philosophy.

There’s always some kind of war going on in universities. In the European Middle Ages, it was between orthodoxy and heresy. In the Enlightenment, it was between the rationalists and the empiricists. But today, one of the sharpest battle lines is between the scientistic and the rest.

The definition of intelligence

Sally Adee for Noema on the extent of non-human intelligence.

Intelligence … is a biological function that evolved not with humans or brains but way back in some form to the earliest organisms, a fundamental biological function like respiration.

Not paying attention

Francis Fukuyama on President Trump.

The United States since 1945 has supported a liberal world order built around norms like not using military force to change borders, and formal agreements for mutual defense like NATO and the security treaties with Japan and South Korea. This system has been spectacularly successful at promoting peace, prosperity, and democracy.

Hope without optimism

Gal Beckerman for The Atlantic on how to remain hopeful in a moment of despair.

As Voltaire called it almost 300 years ago, optimism is “a cruel philosophy hiding under a reassuring name.”

Supernatural

Peter Harrison for Aeon on the complicated origins of scientific naturalism.

The great majority of contemporary philosophers … concur in their rejection of supernatural entities. Indeed, this seems to be one of the few things on which philosophers are able to agree.

Crisis time

Tyson Retz for Epoché on Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.

The problem is, we have too many “various little itches,” as Dostoevsky describes them, that are in conflict with our apparent interests. We routinely set out to annihilate ourselves, go to war, martyr ourselves, climb dangerous mountains, engage in ruinous affairs. For Dostoevsky, freedom is mischievous and fraught, partly because it involves the freedom to abuse it.

Trump 2.0

American philosophers on the ethics of contemporary America.

Other philosophers also highlighted the importance of environment, citing an Aristotelian view that if our leaders are mostly good, we tend to be good, and if they’re mostly bad, we tend to be bad — even if we’re unaware of their influence. Humans are hardwired to imitate; it’s how we learn.

Adrift

Rachel Robison-Greene for 3 Quarks Daily on John Stuart Mill, free speech and bullshit.

Should we continue to allow social media influencers to say whatever they want on their platforms? Should we do something to stop the AI powered bots that serve no purpose but to generate chaos from entering and participating in the marketplace of ideas? Belief formation is a social practice and we have social obligations. Shouldn’t we put into place some guardrails to ensure that the practice is healthy for our communities and our children?

What is Enlightenment?

Peter Adamson for his History of Philosophy podcast series introduces Early Modern Philosophy.

Together, these two developments, metaphysical challenges to the Aristotelian theory of essences and epistemological challenges to the Aristotelian theory of science, created perfect conditions for the rise of new conceptions of knowledge. Rather than investigating the universally valid properties of natural kinds, like giraffe, science would have to proceed using a different method. That method turned out to be empirical.

Audio, 36 mins.

Spellbound

Dennis Duncan for The Guardian on the short, blazing life of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.

He found himself on the run with the dubious honour of being the author of the first printed book ever to be banned by the church.

Philosophical emergency

Faisal Hoque for Fast Company on the critical thinking skills needed in an AI-augmented world.

The profound questions AI raises about consciousness, intelligence, and decision-making aren’t primarily technical problems — they’re philosophical ones.

Update: the article is now only available to subscribers.

Amour-propre

Nat Rutherford for Aeon on how to think about vanity (via Rousseau and Adam Smith).

Video, 5 mins

Crash

Matthew Duncombe for The Conversation on Plato’s critique of democracy.

As with flying a plane, so with ruling a country. Just as we’d want the skilled pilots, not the majority, to fly the plane, we want the skilled rulers, not a majority, to rule our states.

Glimpses through the fog

Eric Schwitzgebel for Aeon celebrates the unique nature of philosophy.

Each of us, when we philosophise, become the means by which the Universe, after billions of years, wakes to itself, momentarily contemplating itself in doubt and amazement. Nothing is more intrinsically valuable. Nothing is more worthy of reverence and awe.

Unreasonable times

Rachel Robison-Greene for 3 Quarks Daily on the value and effect of philosophical conversation.

Our current epistemic climate is unfortunate, to put it mildly. It is hard to form true beliefs or to craft arguments with well-justified premises in a climate of belief formation, particularly online, in which profit is treated as more important than truth.

Sic semper tyrannis

Jorge Álvarez for LBV magazine on the Roman Stoics and their opposition to political oppression.

Cato committed suicide, considering himself incapable of living under the tyranny his enemy would impose.

Down the stairs

Jeremy Stangroom on the notorious story of Arthur Schopenhauer throwing an old woman downstairs.

The important point here, apart from the fact you shouldn’t trust Bertrand Russell’s popular writings, is that the runaway success of A History of Western Philosophy has inevitably solidified this myth in the public imagination.

Philosophy in a wetsuit

Peter Godfrey Smith for Philosophy Bites on encounters with animal minds.

Audio, 18 mins.

Brazen heads

Rebecca McCarthy for The New Republic on AI weapons and the ethics of war.

What’s clear is that artificial intelligence will be unshackled under Trump. It’s hard to imagine it will be ethical. For that matter, can you even teach ethics to a piece of technology with no capacity for doubt?

Why not determinism?

Ben Burgis on G A Cohen and free will.

If your car breaks down and you take it to the mechanic and he says, there was nothing wrong with the engine, nothing wrong with the brakes, nothing wrong with the alternator, nothing wrong with the belts, nothing wrong with the electric system and etc. through an exhaustive list of nothing-wrongs, but it just stopped working, you wouldn’t think huh, I learned something new about how reality works today, sometimes things happen without causes. You’d think you needed a better mechanic.

The Wickedest Man in Europe

Howard Davies for Literary Review on Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees.

Mandeville starts from the premise that human beings are flawed. The consequences, however, may be relatively benign, so long as we don’t try to make people behave better. That way madness lies. We should harness the desires people have to impress their fellows and to overconsume.

Human nature

from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

The Diagnostician of Despair

Robert Zaretsky for The American Scholar on Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

He would not have bothered to note the irony of marketing firms offering advice on how companies can brand themselves as “authentic,” just as he would not bat an eyelash to learn that the rise of depression and disassociation has tracked the rise of social platforms.

Virtual pursuits

Rebecca Lowe has been talking philosophy with ChatGPT — and she is impressed.

If you do it right, talking with Gpt is like talking with someone who’s seriously studied and thought hard about philosophy. Gpt could easily get a PhD on any philosophical topic. More than that, I’ve had many philosophical discussions with professional philosophers that were much less philosophical than my recent chats with Gpt.

Dominican tendencies

Jeremy Stangroom on the temptation of Thomas Aquinas.

Exhausted by his own piety, he scrawled the holy Cross upon the wall of his chamber, offered up a prayer for virginity, and fell into a deep sleep, during which he dreamt of girdles.

The manifest image

Tim Bayne for Aeon on Daniel Dennett’s conception of the mind.

Can we locate the self within a scientific account of the human being? What about beliefs, desires or intentions? What about free will or consciousness? Can science give an account of these phenomena in the way that it has accounted for other aspects of the manifest image (temperature, respiration, lightning) or will (some of) these phenomena go the way of the unicorns, gryphons and dragons of medieval bestiaries — entities that have no place within a scientifically informed catalogue of what there is? It is this question, more than any other, that lay at the heart of Dennett’s project.

A contingent thing

James Lenman for the OUP Blog on the metaphysical questions that underlie our ethics.

All the moral reality we need is something far more human, far closer to home, something that, if we get it right, can be as true and as objective as it needs to be.

Be good for goodness’ sake

Joseph Millum for The Conversation on lying to children about Father Christmas.

Telling children lies to make them behave is manipulative. It stops them from deciding for the right reasons. This includes telling a child that they won’t get Christmas presents unless they are good.

From arguments to aphorisms

Robert Hassan for The MIT Press Reader on Nietzsche’s adoption of the typewriter.

By 1881 Nietzsche had become almost blind, an infirmity that would surely have hampered his longhand writing. How did he manage to improve his work rate? What he did was something seemingly out of character, given his views on modernity and science: He bought a typewriter.

TESCREAL

Peter Ward for New Humanist on the influence of effective altruism.

Two threats, its followers contend, could potentially wipe out the species: an artificial intelligence misaligned with human values, and an engineered pandemic. Using the EA mantra of expected value, it can be argued that addressing these concerns overrides any philanthropic endeavour helping people who are alive today. At the same time, some longtermists envision a future where trillions of people could live in a near-perfect state of well-being. It’s difficult to imagine a scenario that provides as much “value” as that.

Intuitive dualism

Iris Berent for Nautilus on our intuitions about consciousness.

Human cognition, as we know, is laced with biases — we can readily recognize these distortions in visual illusions, auditory hallucinations, and logical fallacies. So, if our perception of the external world is distorted, why assume our internal perception is truthful?

Philosophy of life

Massimo Pigliucci for Big Think on Stoicism as a religion.

Can we appreciate the advice of Epictetus without accepting the metaphysics of the logos, and can we meditate according to Marcus Aurelius without believing there is only one greatest good?

Old Aristotle

Edith Hall for Aeon on the many faces of Aristotle.

In the cases of democracy, women’s rights and abolition, wrestling with Aristotle in practice has been key to the emergence of greater equality. He is a crucial dialogic participant in the dynamic creation of new ideas. We would indeed cancel Aristotle at our peril.

Your fault

Michael Sandel explains the re-election of Donald Trump.

The story we tell about ourselves, that in America you can make it if you try, is demoralizing under conditions where many people found, over the last few decades, that no matter how hard they worked they couldn’t get ahead.

Video, 18 mins.

A mysterious splendour

A new book by Simon Critchley, reviewed in The Guardian, explores the tradition of Christian mysticism.

[Critchley] rightly points out that mysticism has been relegated and ignored within modern philosophy (with rare exceptions such as Nietzsche and Georges Bataille), whose rationalist bias favours critique, sobriety, laboriousness and rigour. He sees his book as a bid to push back against this epochal neglect.

Just stupid

from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Free and fair

Jason Stanley for Project Syndicate on Trump’s election and the end of democracy.

As Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, democracy is at its most vulnerable when inequality in a society has become entrenched and grown too glaring. Deep social and economic disparities create the conditions for demagogues to prey on people’s resentments, and for democracy ultimately to fall in the way that Plato described.

Guardians of space

Jeremy Stangroom on A J Ayer’s near-death experience.

He admitted that while the experience hadn’t converted him to a religious viewpoint, it had “slightly weakened” his conviction that his genuine death would be the end of him.

Belief claims

Gary L Francione for The Philosophers’ Magazine on transgender rights.

We cannot require that people accept as literally true these belief claims asserted by trans activists any more than we can require people to accept and believe in a particular religious tradition. We also cannot require that people act as if these beliefs are true whether or not they believe them to be true any more than we can require them to follow the dictates of a particular religion whether or not they believe in that religion.

Concept creep

Darren Langdridge for spiked on the excesses of academic critical theory.

When I see people arguing that paedophilia and bestiality should be recognised as sexualities in an equivalent manner to being gay or lesbian, I know there is something deeply wrong. When I hear people — including Nicola Sturgeon, the former first minister of Scotland — defending the practice of putting fully intact male rapists in women’s prisons, simply because they claim to be women, then I know we have a problem. And when I watch members of groups like Queers for Palestine cheer on anti-Semitic, misogynistic and homophobic terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, apparently in the service of their avowed anti-colonial, anti-Zionist and anti-capitalist mission, then I know any real critical thinking has left the building.

Is that all?

George Scialabba for Commonweal on Charles Taylor’s analysis of the Romantics.

When we shuffled off our premodern superstitions — e.g. that animals have souls, that certain sacred spaces emanate power, that the cosmos is a Great Chain of Being — rationalists overlooked the possibility that our ancestors were not deluded but only inarticulate. The Romantics did not.

Stuck fast

Jeremy Stangroom explores variations on the Trolley Problem.

There is a difference between killing and letting die, rooted in the relative importance of the obligations imposed by negative and positive duties, such that it is morally justified to kill one person rather than five people, if there is no choice but to kill either one or five, but not necessarily morally permissible to kill one person, where the choice is between killing one person or letting five die.

True to oneself (redux)

Gary Borjesson for 3 Quarks Daily returns to the theme of authenticity.

Like other ethical virtues, such as being courageous or generous or a good friend, authenticity concerns not what we do in a moment but how we go on being (true to) ourselves over time. (You’re not a runner if you’re not in the active habit of running.)

The Edge of Sentience

Jonathan Birch for Philosophy Bites on animal sentience.

What we’ve got is tremendous variation across the animal kingdom in the sentience profile. Sensory abilities vary enormously — lots of other things vary as well, including the intelligence and cognitive sophistication of these animals.

Audio, 28 mins.

Heresy

Andrew Copson for New Humanist on a recent book detailing the contingent rise of Christianity.

Jesus, far from being unique, was just one of many strikingly similar god-men and magicians around in the Roman Mediterranean, with some claiming to perform miracles that are near-identical to those described in the Bible. Walking on water, turning water into wine, healing the sick, raising the dead, feeding vast crowds with food conjured out of thin air, exorcising demons out of men — these were their staples. We have many texts now that show this. We also have multiple images of Jesus holding what appears to be a magic wand in early Christian art.

The greatest good

Jeremy Bentham’s pioneering defence of sexual liberty, from UCL Press.

Video, 13 mins.

Handmaiden to knowledge

Rachel Fraser for Aeon on humility as an intellectual virtue.

There is no method by which to guarantee against fake news or false confidence. Epistemological anxiety is as old as philosophy itself. It deserves a better rejoinder than the moralistic injunction to be humble.

No Foreigners

Jonathan Rée for the London Review of Books on Derrida’s exploration of hospitality.

The double-edged truth of hospitality manifests itself in words as well as deeds. As Derrida points out, the French hôte means ‘guest’ as well as ‘host’, while historical dictionaries trace it to the Latin hospes, which is allied with hostis, which can also mean ‘stranger’, ‘foreigner’ or ‘enemy’.

Moral stalemate

from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

They’re like us

Daniel R DeNicola for The MIT Press on Plato’s cave and ignorance.

We too are haunted by things we do not know we do not know; and we cannot imagine how drastically those unknowns would alter our lives and our view of the world.

The More

Philip Goff for Aeon on his new, heretical faith.

I now think the evidence points towards a hypothesis that John Stuart Mill took seriously: a good God of limited abilities. This hypothesis is able to account both for the imperfections of our universe — in terms of God’s limited abilities — and for the things about our universe that are improbably good, such as fine-tuning and psycho-physical harmony. God would have liked to make intelligent life in an instant, or by breathing into the dust as we see depicted in Genesis. But the only way God was able to create life was by bringing into existence a universe with the right physics that would eventually evolve intelligent life. God made the best universe they could.

Time of the philosopher

Evan Thompson for Aeon on Einstein, Bergson and different accounts of time.

In our daily lives we don’t experience time as a succession of identical units. An hour in the dentist’s chair is very different from an hour over a glass of wine with friends. This is lived time. Lived time is flow and constant change. It is ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’. When we treat time as a series of uniform, unchanging units, like points on a line or seconds on a clock, we lose the sense of change and growth that defines real life; we lose the irreversible flow of becoming, which Bergson called ‘duration’.

True to oneself

Gary Borjesson for 3 Quarks Daily on authenticity,

Who are we when we strip away being a parent or child? When we quit our professional roles and relationships? When we step back from our political and social affiliations? These are questions that Socrates and philosophy press on us. They must be pressed because our tendency is thoughtlessly to accept (or reject) at face value the values and stories we’re given, including the ones we’ve been told about who we are.

Minister for loneliness

Kuo Bian for the Blog of the APA on philosophical approaches to loneliness.

Philosophers are often perceived as lonely figures in the public imagination. The nature of philosophy demands the investment of vast amounts of time pondering, wondering, and navigating mental landscapes that diverge from conventional ideas.

Supposed to hurt

Greg Lukianoff for Quillette on bad arguments against free speech.

You cannot claim to believe in free speech and at the same time carve out an exception for blasphemy. That’s the whole ball game. Ideas of freedom of speech came about precisely to address the tendency to label unorthodox views as heretical.

The structure of experience

Adam Frank for Big Think on phenomenology and science.

Experience is so close and immediate that we have lost the ability to see it. That’s a problem because it is the necessary precondition that must already be happening for us even to formulate the idea of subjects or observers. We must always already be embedded in what Husserl called the “lifeworld”: a seamlessly whole, ongoing, enacted, and embodied being.

A great joy and happiness

Arthur C Brooks for The Atlantic on John Stuart Mill and happiness.

To refine your pleasure necessitates effort and a serious investment in self-improvement. Push-pin is easy; poetry is hard. But poetry rewards the effort with deeper, longer-lasting satisfaction.

Selfish genes

Jeremy Stangroom on Richard Dawkins, Mary Midgley and the misunderstanding of sociobiology.

It is not unusual for ideology to affect the judgements that people make about scientific theories, and where these theories have implications for understanding human beings it is especially commonplace. But what it has meant in the case of sociobiology is that the public space for the debate about evolutionary ideas has become polluted by the hyperbole that almost inevitably occurs when the politically engaged feel their baseline commitments to be under threat.

LucretiusGPT

Justin Weinberg for Daily Nous on using AI trained on the works of specific philosophers.

I know that after four years of exposure to generative AI we may be somewhat desensitized to the wonders of this technology.

Bats, violets and zombies

Amy Kind for Psyche on how to think philosophically about consciousness.

What if we are having very different colour qualia when we both look at the red light? Maybe when you look at a red light you are having the colour qualia that I have when I look at a green light, and vice versa. How could we ever tell one way or the other?

Disproportionate

Catherine Robb is offering an online course in the philosophy of Taylor Swift.

I don’t think it is possible to analyze these issues in just one song because her entire body of work focuses on these issues. Here she can present and substantiate her ideas systematically and methodically. This is very similar to what we do when we do philosophy.

Disciple of Dionysus

Mat Messerschmidt for The Point on Nietzsche and masculinity.

Nietzsche seems to say, as stridently as possible, “Be a man!” but to ask in the same breath, “But what is a man?” Reactionary followers seem to want to hear only the imperative, and feminist scholars to hear only the question.

Risk with direction

J Aaron Simmons for the Next Big Idea Club on Kierkegaard.

If we embrace faithfulness as a way of life, we better understand that the goal is not to catch the trophy trout (though that is cool) but to be someone who keeps fishing.

Fifth Wheel

George Scialabba for The Hedgehog Review on two recent approaches to free will.

Our millennia-long failure to make appreciable, or any, progress toward an answer, suggests that we are in the presence of a pseudoproblem.

Teacher of the human race

Jeremy Stangroom on the strange deification of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Rousseau may well have been, as one scholar has suggested, a masochist, exhibitionist, onanist, hypochondriacal, paranoiac, narcissistic, irritable and miserly, but there is no doubting his ability to write.

Moral heroes

Elizabeth Harman for Philosophy Bites on moral heroes.

Sometimes there’s something above and beyond what morality requires, that you might realise you should do, even though you don’t have to do it.

Audio, 15 mins.